Beverly Grier is an American academic in the study of child labor Sub-Saharan Africa, and former professor of government at Clark University. She is also the former president of the African Studies Association. She currently serves as Interim Associate Dean for Curriculum & Student Affairs at North Carolina A&T State University.
Grier's most recent book is Invisible Hands: Child Labor and the State in Colonial Zimbabwe (Heinemann, 2005). [1]
She has published many other articles and books on Africa, including "Women in West Africa" in the Women's Studies Encyclopedia, Making Sense of Our Differences: African American Women on Anita Hill , [2] Wayne State University Press, Pawns, Porters and Petty Traders: Women in the Transition to Export Agriculture in Ghana, Westview Press, Politics in Niger , Oxford University Press, Contradiction, Crisis and Class Conflict: The State and Capitalist Development in Ghana Prior to 1948, Oxford University Press, "Underdevelopment, Modes of Production and the State in Colonial Ghana", African Studies Review, and "Cocoa Marketing in Colonial Ghana: Capitalist Enterprise and the Emergence of a Rural African Bourgeoisie", 1980–1981.
Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet" who dedicated her life and talents to confronting different forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions" among "those who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children."
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States refers to the institution of slavery that existed in the European colonies in North America which eventually became part of the United States of America. Slavery developed due to a combination of factors, primarily the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies, which had resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by European colonists during the era.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or imposed involuntarily as a judicial punishment. The practice has been compared to the similar institution of slavery, although there are differences.
African socialism or Afrosocialism is a belief in sharing economic resources in a traditional African way, as distinct from classical socialism. Many African politicians of the 1950s and 1960s professed their support for African socialism, although definitions and interpretations of this term varied considerably. These politicians include Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Modibo Keita of Mali, among others.
The national flag of Ghana consists of a horizontal triband of red, yellow, and green. It was designed in replacement of the British Gold Coast's Blue Ensign.
Ama Ata Aidoo was a Ghanaian author, poet, playwright, politician, and academic. She was Secretary for Education in Ghana from 1982 to 1983 under Jerry Rawlings's PNDC administration. Her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, was published in 1965, making Aidoo the first published female African dramatist. As a novelist, she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1992 with the novel Changes. In 2000, she established the Mbaasem Foundation in Accra to promote and support the work of African women writers.
Marian Wright Edelman is an American activist for civil rights and children's rights. She is the founder and president emerita of the Children's Defense Fund. She influenced leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.
African-American history started with the arrival of Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Former Spanish slaves who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.
Anna Pauline "Pauli" Murray was an American civil rights activist, advocate, legal scholar and theorist, author and – later in life – an Episcopal priest. Murray's work influenced the civil rights movement and expanded legal protection for gender equality.
Frederick Cooper is an American historian who specializes in colonialization, decolonialization, and African history. From 1974 to 1982 he was Assistant, then Associate Professor at Harvard University. Becoming Professor of History at the University of Michigan in 1982, he left for a professorship of history at New York University where he has worked since 2002.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.
Giovanni Arrighi was an Italian economist, sociologist and world-systems analyst, from 1998 a Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Ritual servitude is a practice in Ghana, Togo, and Benin where traditional religious shrines take human beings, usually young virgin girls, in payment for services or in religious atonement for alleged misdeeds of a family member. In Ghana and in Togo, it is practiced by the Ewe people in the Volta region; in Benin, it is practiced by the Fon.
The continent of Africa is one of the regions most rife with contemporary slavery. Slavery in Africa has a long history, within Africa since before historical records, but intensifying with the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trade and again with the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the demand for slaves created an entire series of kingdoms which existed in a state of perpetual warfare in order to generate the prisoners of war necessary for the lucrative export of slaves. These patterns persisted into the colonial period during the late 19th and early 20th century. Although the colonial authorities attempted to suppress slavery from about 1900, this had very limited success, and after decolonization, slavery continues in many parts of Africa despite being technically illegal.
Jane I. Guyer was the George Armstrong Kelly Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.
Child labour in Africa is generally defined based on two factors: type of work and minimum appropriate age of the work. If a child is involved in an activity that is harmful to his/her physical and mental development, he/she is generally considered as a child labourer. That is, any work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children, and interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work. Appropriate minimum age for each work depends on the effects of the work on the physical health and mental development of children. ILO Convention No. 138 suggests the following minimum age for admission to employment under which, if a child works, he/she is considered as a child laborer: 18 years old for hazardous works, and 13–15 years old for light works, although 12–14 years old may be permitted for light works under strict conditions in very poor countries. Another definition proposed by ILO's Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labor (SIMPOC) defines a child as a child labourer if he/she is involved in an economic activity, and is under 12 years old and works one or more hours per week, or is 14 years old or under and works at least 14 hours per week, or is 14 years old or under and works at least one hour per week in activities that are hazardous, or is 17 or under and works in an "unconditional worst form of child labor".
Eliza Anna Grier (1864–1902) was an American physician and the first African American woman licensed to practice medicine in the U.S. state of Georgia.
Mabel Dove Danquah was a Gold Coast-born journalist, political activist, and creative writer, one of the earliest women in West Africa to work in these fields. As Francis Elsbend Kofigah notes in relation to Ghana's literary pioneers, "before the emergence of such strong exponents of literary feminism as Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, there was Mabel Dove Danquah, the trail-blazing feminist." She used various pseudonyms in her writing for newspapers from the 1930s: "Marjorie Mensah" in The Times of West Africa; "Dama Dumas" in the African Morning Post; "Ebun Alakija" in the Nigerian Daily Times; and "Akosua Dzatsui" in the Accra Evening News. Entering politics in the 1950s before Ghana's independence, she became the first woman to be elected a member of any African legislative assembly. She created the awareness and the need for self-governance through her works.
Allen Isaacman is an American historian specializing in the social history of Southern Africa. He is a Regents Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. In 2015, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.